


Diptych

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 18:50:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Josh and Sam, at the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diptych

_New Hampshire, January 1999_

Out in the night-becoming-morning, it's hard to make out faces. Josh watches the movement of a glowing cigarette tip, flitting up and down and around the windows. Outside, the air is freezing and front-loaded with the dawn.

Sam looks up as he draws near. "Need to nail the end," he mutters, pacing a groove into the thick frost. "This afternoon, informal address in several cafés, coffee shops."

Josh isn't listening. They're going to get the assembled masses out here today, he thinks. The campaign is a tide across the country, the first waves breaking here on the east shore, today on this deserted street in this deserted morning in this tiny state a long way from home. He's been waiting a long time for this.

It's hard, though, to feel the enthusiasm early in the day, in the morning of the campaign in the candidate's home state, with miles to go and promises to keep. God's own country, Bartlet had said. Josh doesn't doubt it. It sure as hell isn't the other place, but right now he's thinking he wouldn't mind pitchforks and brimstone if it only meant he'd be toasty warm.

"And did you see this?" Sam continues, waving his bits of paper about. Josh wonders vaguely how many things he does at once. "Some jumped-up local paper is planning to screw us in every op-ed from now until Judgement unless we sign the pledge. You know what pledge?"

Josh shakes his head, thinks of Leo McGarry staring at every bottle as though salvation lies within.

Sam reads it to him. "I recognize the New Hampshire Presidential primary's historic importance... blah, blah, blah... and will do all in my power to _protect the primary_ in accordance with the New Hampshire Secretary of State's charge under New Hampshire law. You know what that means?"

"Let's pretend I don't." Josh knows perfectly well what it means. But he wants to hear Sam tell him, and he knows what that probably means, too.

It's still too dim to make out features, and if Josh hadn't been so tired and Sam so engrossed one of them would have noticed the figure crossing the glass behind them. He perches himself on Sam's trestle-table and says, conversationally, "Where are you boys from?"

"Governor!" says Josh, idiotically, thinking about getting the man a chair, maybe one with a cushion on it, maybe with an _apple_ on it, Jesus. He's too old for this.

"Just answer the question." Close to, the governor's eyes hold something of the morning light, reflected twinkles of grey.

"Connecticut," Josh says, sighing.

With the wistfulness of lost sunshine, Sam mutters, "California."

"Then perhaps you wouldn't understand." Bartlet leans back, balancing on nothingness. "This is New Hampshire. This is where it begins. My life, my family, my political career, my campaign. Right here, right now, I've got my roots to be thinking of." He smiles. "And I'm signing the pledge. Have a good day."

He walks off, making perfectly defined footprints in the frost, traipsing water into campaign headquarters.

"Roots," says Sam suddenly. "From my roots, I look to grow" – he's scribbling now, madly, fingers blue from cold – "into full bloom..." – scribble – "as leader of this nation."

Josh smiles to himself, helplessly, warmed by rhetoric, and then sits beside Sam on the table, swinging his legs to an accompaniment of creaks.

"You'll break it," Sam mutters, looking up from the page.

"You'll die young," Josh answers, taking the cigarette from Sam's cold fingers.

"I don't smoke," Sam says, quietly, and Josh isn't one for Sam's turn of phrase, nor one to sully metaphor with real life, but there might be something in it on this cold, cold morning, the first one of the campaign: he's alone with Sam, he's got the western expanse of the country behind his back, and they're blowing smoke into the vastness of the atmosphere.

*

_Washington DC, later_

Sam is supposed to be doing something else right now. He's got eyes pinned wide open from the day's accumulated tiredness, and not much to show for it: yelling across the pork barrel to the Senate minority leader, a squeaky wheel on his desk chair and yet another argument with Toby over the grace and beauty of the split infinitive. A day when the administration hadn't quite saved the world, no grand oratory blowing fresh air, autumn leaves through America's windows. He still thinks it might happen someday, maybe. That contract law stultifies, is the stuffy, dead air in long meetings, and professional politics always makes a room smell sour, but in some way he and Josh are always on the road to New Hampshire, holding aloft the real thing, that they'll get there only when they grow cynical, or old.

"It's a legacy," CJ is saying beneath him, stretched out on the step beneath the night sky like she's bathing in starlight, and Sam gets tired of the grandiloquence in his internal monologue, feels they put poetry where it has no place, the gritty mundanities of life, but tonight it's real and true. CJ is worth a rhetorical flourish. "People want to leave something of themselves behind."

"But a law?" Josh asks. "He wants a _law_?"

Josh has a way about him when he thinks something is crap, disdain but also a kind of bemusement, as though at an elephant in Congress, an amazement that such a thing can exist, here or now or anywhere. Sam finds it endearing, sometimes.

"There've been laws," CJ says lazily. "Megan's Law."

"Megan was an eight-year-old girl who was murdered in 1994," Sam objects. "Not, I believe, a nutty old Democrat with a large stick up his even larger ass."

"Thank you, Sam, I'm aware of that," CJ tells him. "I'm merely pointing out that the thing isn't without precedent. There have been laws named for people. And that nutty old Democrat, as you put it, has donated more than a million dollars to the party."

"Still, a law?" Josh persists. "What'll it be? The William Whipple Nuclear Test Ban Treaty? The Whipple Clean Air Rehabilitation Act?"

"Maybe." CJ is getting bored of the topic and again, Sam thinks there's something he's forgotten to do. At one time, a thousand years ago in another life, he could forget his keys and forget to go to class and forget his mother's birthday, and nothing he ever did could break the world. It still can't, but he left his sense of perspective behind him with those years.

He shifts upwards, sits beside Josh, who makes a pretence of reading the papers they brought along but is really looking up, up at the clouded night. It's getting colder, cloudier; there's rarely any glory in the DC sky, even when you sit on the street at midnight, looking for it.

"There are other ways to leave a legacy," Donna says suddenly. "You could have something else named after you. A school. A library. A dessert."

"A dessert?" CJ and Josh chorus.

"Anna Pavlova had a dessert named after her." She smiles, dreamily. "We could do that. We could have... I don't know, the Bartlet Tartlet."

Sam laughs, suddenly, watching his own mirth make layers of mist in the air around him. The wreaths of condensation make him think about whirling skirts, about meringues, about smoke.

"Want one?" Josh says, fingers curling over his.

"I don't," Sam answers, but the cigarette passes between their hands anyway and he's forgotten what this feels like, this ease and grace of movement, this falling into a moment below the vault of sky.

"You'll die young," CJ says, sternly, leaning back on the steps. It's the sort of tone of voice she reserves for uppity reporters, wry, filled with undercurrents of affection.

"Give me four more years" – and he leans back beside her, looks up at their sky smoggy with possibilities, and holds a tip of light up towards the western plains.


End file.
